Katherine L. Holmes

Katherine L. Holmes began writing novels for children after she was a winner of The Loft’s Children’s Literature Prize. Then, she obtained a M.A. in Writing at the University of Minnesota. Her short story collection,Curiosity Killed the Sphinx and Other Stories,was published in 2012 by Hollywood Books International, the fiction imprint of Press Americana. Forthcoming from Silver Knight Publishing is The Wide Awake Loons. Katherine lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Website: http://home.earthlink.net/~klouholmes/
Twitter: @klouholmes
Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://katherinelholmes.blogspot.com/

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• Pirates of Savannah: The Complete Trilogy (Adult Version) - Historical Fiction Action Adventure on Oct. 29, 2011
  
  Tarrin Lupo’s depiction of Patrick, an emigrant from a debtor’s prison to America, is spirited and beyond the shock of his being sold with other ship passengers as indentured servants. The historical landscape is at once established in the American south of the 1700s. But this is an adventure besides its descriptions of Oglethorpe and the blacksmith family where Patrick, once a jeweler, is established. The environment is chaotic and that opens up the plot to Patrick’s journeying with another of his shipmates to Freemasons who, with Indians, elude the British. They eventually confront pirates on the seas. The dialogue and characters are convincing of this time. And what is more convincing is the adventure in a region where Indians, black men, and the Spanish are implicated in Patrick’s quest to buy his own freedom and to find his sister, arrived in Savannah. The illustration adds to this book. I admired the author’s ability to create these historical scenes so that the characters of diverse fortune and race feel realistic.
  
• Draegnstoen on Dec. 18, 2011
  
  Draegnstoen settles at once into the bones. After so much Arthurian tragedy, this book glimmers of a triumphant end, that of the Britain tribes ousting the Romans. I was entranced with the royalty that led to Coel, Old King Cole in British legend, his brother's marriage to his sister and the dragon hunts, depicted so that I wondered if dragons might have become an extinct species in Britain. The momentum along with the details made me confident of the author's research into the fifth century A.D. And the intermarriage with the Pict tribes from Scotland was charming, in dialogue and in the uncertainty of the alliance. The Pict princess entered battle tattooed and she had a crow at command. This whole book is elegantly constructed with intrigue and the spying that finally gathers the tribes to Coel. They fight the Romans, one thane revenging a crucifixion, and as the Goths dominate Rome. But it is the focus on individuals that keeps one reading. In the end, I felt a chill in my spine because I believed this book had comprehended early Britain and a war it had won.